Seedtime and harvest

The garden is soggy with wet leaves. It’s official; it’s autumn. I have been exploring Keats’ Ode to Autumn with Year 12. The pupils think he wrote the poem just to torture them, so I assured them that he was not compiling the syllabus for GCSE English Lit but simply screaming out in praise to the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. I asked them to learn the first stanza because, whether you’re a banker or a builder, everyone should know these lines of soft consonants and long vowels.

A few weeks ago the man and I took a walk up the field beside the house to watch the huge yellow Holland harvester gobble up swathes of barley, remove the stalks from its teeth and spit the precious, golden seeds into a tall trailer. I climbed up the ladder and sifted the gentle grains through my fingers. I wanted to touch the natural process of seedtime and harvest that goes on around us, largely unheeded.

I love the rhythms of the land. Already those rejected stalks have been curled into bales which rolled slowly down the hill and were carted off. This week the field was ploughed up – long rivulets of warm soil dotted with greedy birds. The earth waiting and resting like the goddess in Keats’ poem ‘sitting careless on a granary floor’ or sound asleep on a half-reaped furrow ‘drowsed with the fume of poppies’. She is the personification of the season, conspiring with the ‘maturing sun’ and waiting patiently by the cider press ‘watching the last oozings hours by hours’.

A friend of mine went to New England in the fall. She and her husband were eager to witness the spectacular display of vibrant reds, ochres and oranges on the undressing trees. However, the seasons were reticent to change and they missed the show. They met an American woman and expressed their disappointment to her. A few weeks later, on a cold Irish morning when my friend’s husband was ill and the future looked bleak, she received a box in the post. It was from their brief acquaintance in the States and it was filled to the brim with colourful autumn leaves!

Autumn is in no hurry. She knows that although she has been stripped bare – of sheaves and leaves, life will return if she can only watch and wait. It’s the resting in the glow of fruit-bearing satisfaction, a hiatus before the time for seeds to bury themselves in the cold ground, invisible but germinating nonetheless. There is a hint of winter in the final lines of the poem when the ‘gathering swallows twitter in the skies’. However, as the sun sets over the ‘stubble-plains’ and the birds prepare to fly south, autumn sings her own songs.

It’s hard to keep singing when the summer’s over and winter looms. In this world of rush, it’s important to take time to do autumn – to give thanks and store up a harvest of praise which will see us through the dearth of winter. As the wise man said there is, ‘A time to plant and a time to uproot.’ And in between there is a time to wait.

I don’t enjoy waiting. I always join the queue that seems to be moving quicker to avoid the misery of standing still. I want to get to the front quickly to find the answers I need and move on. Ghandi said, ‘There is more to life than increasing its speed.’ Stillness is essential as a seedbed of creativity and growth. Sometimes life’s experiences need time to incubate before they can birth something new.

In my nostalgic longing for warmer days and my fear of winter chills, I don’t want to miss out on autumn’s silence.

‘Watching and waiting, looking above
Filled with his goodness, lost in his love.’

Facing Out

Yesterday, my colleague and I headed off to Dublin in a bus with fourteen A level pupils. We visited the WB Yeats exhibition at the National Library and then went to see Wayne Jordan’s production of The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey in the Abbey Theatre.

As we sat in the auditorium I tried to imagine the scenes at the Abbey in February 1926 when the first production of the play was greeted by riots of a similar kind to those which had greeted Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. Then it was the use of the word ‘shift’ on stage that did it but with O’Casey the objection was not moral but political.

The problem started in the second act. Incidentally, did you know that this was originally written as a one act play called The Cooing of Doves? It slotted right into the middle of the story of ‘little red-lipped Nora’ and her husband Jack Clitheroe, who in Act One is sulking because he ‘wasn’t made a captain of’. Act Two opens with the prostitute, Rosie Redmond, setting the scene in the public house. This was shocking enough but provoked nothing like the reaction caused when three men in uniform, Clitheroe (now promoted and in the thick of revolt), Langon and Brennan entered carrying the two flags of the combatant Irish forces: the tricolour of the National Volunteers and the plough-and-stars of the Irish Citizen Army. On the fourth night of the 1926 run there was present a large number of women closely associated with the men who had fought, died or been imprisoned in the 1916 rising. The sight of the flags sparked off massive resistance to what was perceived as an insult to the patriot dead. Women screamed and hurled shoes, they invaded the stage and were thrown into the orchestra, blows were exchanged and one young man swung on the curtain which was being hurriedly lowered. The pandemonium caused a panic among the audience, who dashed for the exits and added to the confusion.

In the days that followed, Yeats gave a public lecture at which he said that the rioters had ‘rocked the cradle of genius’. Just ten years after the Easter Rising, people believed that O’Casey had failed to honour the sacrifice of the Irish heroes. In the current run of the play the bar in Act Two cleverly doubles as the platform for the speaker addressing the crowds gathered on the streets of Dublin in the days leading up to the rising, usually presented as a silhouetted figure in the window. It is he who declares: ‘War is a terrible thing, but war is not an evil thing’ and that Ireland should welcome war as the ‘Angel of God’. Echoing the words of Pádriac Pearse, he justifies rebellion against the British: ‘Ireland, unfree, shall never be at peace.’

The play focuses not on the events in and around the GPO, but on the suffering of a group of people living in poverty in a dirty Dublin tenement. Jack rises to the call and dies an ignominious death, leaving his pregnant wife to grieve the loss of her husband and stillborn baby. In this, as in every conflict, it is the working-class poor who hope for the most and suffer the most. It is the socialist, Young Covey, who closely reflects O’Casey’s own views: ‘If they were fightin’ for anything worthwhile, I wouldn’t mind.’ For exposing the futility of the politicians’ pursuit of lofty ideals in indifference to the plight of the poor, O’Casey was lambasted as bringing a slur on the names of the martyrs. The Easter Rising was over before it had hardly begun and the quick executions of its leaders sowed the seeds of years of bloody conflict in Ireland.

I cannot think of the Easter Rising without remembering a chapter in my own life. I was the ghost writer for a church leader’s memoirs, Paul Reid of Christian Fellowship Church, Belfast. In 1993, the publisher gave it the title A New Easter Rising, rather pretentious I thought, given that the 1916 one didn’t go too well. Portentous, even, because although Paul’s story is a truthful account of his journey into faith and church leadership, CFC also failed to produce what it promised.

The book's origin was in an Easter gathering of churches north and south, Protestant and Catholic, at Mosney called 'Together for the Kingdom'. Great crowds, great worship, great preaching, great everything, apart that is from the amusements which were a health and safety nightmare! In his forward to Paul’s book Roger Forster called this cross-border, cross-community congregation an ‘historic conference’. The declared vision was to see ‘new churches springing up through the length and breadth of Ireland’. In that spirit of hope, Paul predicted that CFC would plant 400 churches in Ireland by 2010, not to mention one in Europe. Paul stuck his neck out in print and I was party to it and we were soon sorry. Paul has had an amazing ministry in Belfast and beyond but to date we have only one church plant in its infancy. Sadly, 'Together for the Kingdom' was also short-lived. In just a few years the event was cancelled amidst murmurings about 'pushy northerners' and cultural differences.

And the lesson? Don’t put your trust in the rallying calls of princes, politicians, or pastors! They cannot, in fact, see into the future and they are often wrong. The Church is not about what we can achieve or build but about facing out towards a hurting world. There has only been one successful Easter rising. On my desk sits a smoothly weathered granite stone from the majestic Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe. On it a friend has written:

He has risen! He is not here.

Into Narnia

It’s been a wet weekend – the kind of rain that’s ‘on for the day’ and makes gardening impossible. There was nothing for it but to tackle some of those inside jobs that have needed doing all summer. Fourteen years ago we packed much of our lives into boxes and headed off to Africa with what we could carry in our car encased inside a forty foot container. What remained was stored in our very own Narnia and some of the boxes haven't been opened since.

At the back of the closet set into the eaves in my son’s bedroom is a door leading into another small room above the front return of the house. It is a perfect place to put the stuff we don’t want anyone to see. It was wet weather that forced the Pevensie children to play hide and seek and led to Lucy’s first adventure through the wardrobe where she met Mr Tumnus and time stood still. As the rain drummed on the roof we ventured at last into the dark recesses to clear away the ‘pruck’.

It’s amazing what memories are released by forgotten treasures: old university files (I’m teaching The Tempest and thought I’d never read it until I found notes on it in my own fair hand!); a copy of Sex in the Real World which I wrote for the Presbyterian youth department; precious drawings penned by our own four at primary school; an entire community of Sylvanian families; a bedraggled owl which fell out of a tree, was resurrected by a taxidermist and then mauled by our puppy; books and books and books and a menagerie of stuffed toys.

I found a tiny pair of red Dunlop wellington boots which I know Joshua wore as a toddler but which didn’t originally belong to him. I can remember it so well. It was 1975. I had gone to a university pre-term weekend in Portrush and the day I was due to leave was also the first anniversary of my romance with ‘little blue Richard’. I looked out of the first floor window of the boarding house where we were staying and there he was leaning out of the car window holding aloft a life size model of Paddington bear wearing a yellow hat, blue duffel coat and, yes, red wellies! In a big box at the back I found poor Paddington, rather the worse for wear and neglect, and he was reunited with his boots.

As for letters and photos and papers and cards! I came across a shoebox containing faded pieces of paper. Among them was the only surviving copy of the constitution of the Spinsters’ Union, convened in the library of Regent House School during a sixth form ‘study period’ when a group of us had no boyfriends. It is hilarious, advocates moderation in all things and eschewing the ‘gross moral turpitude of marital relations’. Club members were not allowed to be seen conversing with the opposite sex without a chaperone and we pledged to wear only skirts that ‘rendered the knees invisible’. I was the president and there were three named members. The document details the misdemeanours of one Pearl Clarke (Miss) whose membership had been withdrawn for yielding to temptation. Of course, in the years that followed, we all embraced marriage as soon as we were asked – one member twice!

Another card that raised a smile contained a poem written by a friend which chronicled an incident that took place a few years into my own marriage. We were holidaying in a caravan in Donegal with two infants and to while away an evening we resorted to playing cards. What happened next went down in history, as the boy who managed to fail A level Geography because he was honing his poker skills at the back of the classroom faced total humiliation.

There was a young couple from Ards
Who fancied a quick game of cards
‘Oh honey,’ she cried,
‘Let’s play some rummy,
And we’ll have a bet on the side.

He said, ‘I’m no choker – let’s play some poker
Where the loser takes off his clothes.
He was so smug, ’cause he thought, ‘She’s a mug,’
So they dealt the first hand fully clothed.

He first lost his shoes, his socks and his sweater,
Next came his shirt and it didn’t get better,
She lost not a hand to the guy from the band,
As her clubs and diamonds they blended
Till he sat there naked as God intended.

If there’s a moral to this saucy tale
Due to desires between male and female,
Don’t play cards with one who’s a prude,
Cause it’ll be a waste of time if you end up in the nude!

I always find that newspapers are much more interesting when they’re spread out on the floor about to be scrunched to set the fire. So it is with the past. It’s been slow going in Narnia as time has stood still and the debris of my life has been strewn at my feet. I have laughed and wept at the years that are gone and wondered what the young woman I was would make of the person I have become. The past probably wasn't as much fun as I remember and the future will look different from what I expect when I get there. Now is all I have. Sue Monk Kidd says that, 'Time isn't a straight line along which we travel, but a deep dot in which we dwell.' Like the children who first discovered Narnia I too want to go ‘further up and further in’.

‘This is your life. Are you who you wanna be?’ Switchfoot

'Plate of Eyes'

On Friday, I got up just after dawn and emerged bleary-eyed into the misty morning. The air was heavy with damp and auguries of autumn. I donned my daughter’s wellies and plunged into the hedgerows, plastic container in hand, in search of blackberries, my only company a wary driver on the early shift and insomniac insects.

I wasn’t preparing for a crumble with Braeburn apples and cinnamon but collecting a visual aid for a Year 11 poetry class. Good old Seamus Heaney! His own boyhood experiences gathering wild berries have been captured for posterity in his poem Blackberry Picking. He describes the childish enthusiasm of trekking through cornfields and potato drills and collecting blackberries in jam-pots and pea tins. His imagery is alive with colour: ‘a glossy purple clot’; ‘thickened like wine’; ‘summer’s blood was in it’ and ‘the red ones inked up’. By the time I had finished allowing the pupils to taste the pulpy fruit and had squeezed a few berries between my fingers, my palms too were ‘sticky as Bluebeard’s’.

As I reached up and plucked the fruit from the bush I was thinking about what it means to be ripe for picking. The days are shortening and there are red and green berries still on the bush which will never fill up with wine-red colour – it’s too late. The summer is over and they will wither where they hang, some already wrapped in webs and moulding leaves. If we go at life’s experience too hard we can end up with a handful of shrivelled moments which never actually come to anything. Life’s best things take time. Other berries are too ripe with a faintly alcoholic whiff and these bleed onto your fingertips before you can eat them. Like the ‘What ifs?’ and ‘If onlys’ of life their time has passed and they will never be jam.

The blackberry whose time has come is dark and full-bodied and leaves the twig with just a tiny pull of resistance before tumbling gladly into the receptacle - open mouth or pyrex pie dish. It’s ready for anything and will fulfil the purpose for which it was created.

Would that I could do the same! I often feel that I’m green and cowardly or ready too late. Yet I neither want to wither nor go to waste. Seamus and the boys carried their hoard of blackberries to the byre and emptied them into the bath, rushing off for more and more until discovering to their dismay that the fruit was rotting – the feast had decayed before it had even been enjoyed. Heaney recalls his bitter frustration, ‘I always felt like crying.’

At the end of my class, the not-yet-ripe berries lay untouched on the desks, ‘hard as a knot’, or were kicked along the floor, and the rest have been left festering together in the dark on the shelf at the back of the room. Next Friday I will hand the container round again and the pupils will gag at the sour smell of fermenting fruit, gazing in horror at the ‘rat-grey fungus’ which will inevitably form.

I asked the class what they thought the poem was about and one child suggested, ‘Disappointment’. Can life’s disappointments be avoided? Probably not. However, we can try to be alert to all possibilities and say yes more than we say no. If Shrek were a blackberry he would be jumping up and down shouting, ‘Pick me!’

I can’t remember who said how sad it would be if we reached the point of death only to realise that we had never really lived. Let’s seize the day as it comes. Oswald Chambers talks about us being broken bread and poured out wine for other people if we speak and act at the right moment. I suppose that means an alertness to really listen and a willingness to be harvested and crushed so that the juice of kindness flows. Let’s not allow pessimism and fear to rob us of belief. We cannot put our talents in store – now is the accepted time.

‘Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.’

Courage to Contradict

I have a very clever daughter. Well, I actually have three clever daughters but the one I’m thinking of is working in medical research towards her PhD at Trinity College, Dublin.

It’s really interesting. Did you know that there is a group of women known as the Dublin Cohort who were given contaminated Anti D treatment during childbirth which infected them with Hepatitis C for life? Many developed chronic liver disease but others were discovered to be clear of infection years later. The question is how did their immune systems overcome what is an incurable disease? Can the body’s natural killer cells be boosted to counteract infections such as Hep C and HIV? One hundred and seventy million people worldwide currently have Hep C and every one of them would be please to know that there are people like my daughter working long hours in lonely labs looking for new pathways to minimise the side-effects of treatments.

However, smart or not, this aforementioned daughter has gaping holes in her education. I stood with her recently in a well known supermarket as she deliberated in the cleaning products aisle. She gazed in consternation at the colourful bottles on display. She was having difficulty differentiating between detergent, with which to cleanse clothes, and fabric conditioner, with which to separate the tangled weave and leave garments smelling of 'summer breeze infusions with pure oxygen freshness'. Much to my amusement she was genuinely bewildered and admitted that she has never really known which was which. I blame her mother! When she had her head in Chemistry and Maths books I should have been teaching her to hand wash delicates and iron collars and cuffs first. Had I not neglected instruction in the essential art of homemaking she might have been better prepared for important life choices.

The Sunday Times ran a feature in their Style magazine this week detailing advice mothers give to their daughters on how to achieve success and happiness. Apparently formal education cannot teach the life lessons our offspring need to know. Among the ‘Pearls of Wisdom’ imparted by loving mothers to their daughters was the warning to beware of a boyfriend who fits your skinny jeans (because his legs should be bigger than yours) and the injunction to snog at least one man with really long hair!

I was clearing out some of my parents’ papers this week when I came upon their marriage certificate. I was amazed to find my mother’s occupation listed as a ‘domestic’. I had never heard this word used as a noun until we went to live in Zimbabwe where maids were officially known as domestic workers or ‘domestics’ for short. Ours was called Veronicah, or at least we thought that was her name until several months into our relationship she confessed that her name was actually Ronicah but a white woman had mistakenly added the prefix and she had not had the courage to contradict her. We settled on Vero.

My mother was not just domesticated ie a woman with finely tuned skills in polishing, sweeping, cooking, scrubbing and baking but she was a domestic ie a woman who was defined by this homely role. Like many in her generation she never had a paid job outside the home, in spite of a latent longing to be a teacher.

Being a domestic was certainly not bliss in the days before automatic washing machines, microwaves, dishwashers and dysons. Women had few choices and for those like my mum who grew up during the war, there were even fewer as the men went to fight and the women took over jobs on the farm. However, without any ‘ologies’ to her name her spirit was strong enough to break the mould, date a German prisoner of war and be the first in her village to go off to college in Scotland, no less.

Anyway, according to Style magazine I’m going to turn into my mother and my girls are going to turn into me:

‘The daughter of the mother is a total clone, a carbon copy from the elasticated waistband down and the doughy chest up.’

How did they know about my doughy chest? Heaven help them if this is true. I had more opportunities than my mother and I want my girls to climb higher than I. It’s character and courage that count for women. I don’t want to pass on beauty tips to my daughters like ‘a tan fades but wrinkles don’t’ or teach them how to make a fancy cocktail - they can discover those things for themselves. I want them to be strong on the inside, to remember who they belong to and to love people. I want them to have the strength to go for it, to say what their real name is, to stand up for what is right and good, to have the courage of their convictions and to keep on becoming till the end.

In final frustration I explained to my daughter that washing her clothes in Lenor would be like washing her hair with conditioner. Like Archimedes, another nerdy scholar who probably didn’t have detergent or conditioner in his famous bath, Eureka! She got it.

Love thy Neighbour

I stood in the butcher’s the other day and watched him crack pork ribs apart with a meat cleaver. Not unlike a machete, I thought. As he shook the powdered barbeque sauce into the bag my eyes wandered round the market square outside. The place was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers: families with young children by the hand or in buggies; elderly men and women out and about for a few ‘messages’; teenagers lounging on walls in the late summer sunshine watching the world go by. People were eating Cafolla’s ice cream and gazing into shop windows at the ‘Final reductions’ and new school shoes.

Fleetingly, because that’s all I could bear, I allowed my mind to imagine the carnage if suddenly neighbour turned on neighbour to torture and kill – right there in the street while the sun beamed down, with kitchen knives. How long does it actually take to kill a struggling, screaming man with a blade? Where does the killer cut first, and second? How much blood is in one person? A whole family?

Stop right there, I told myself. I paid for the ribs and began to plan the salads for the braai. I stepped back into the square and breathed a sigh of thanks for the normality of it all.

In the week when elections were held in Rwanda, I’ve been reading about the 1994 massacre when possibly one million people were slaughtered in just one hundred days. Some of the horror of it was captured in the film Hotel Rwanda which told the true story of Paul Rusesabagina who sheltered refugees at the Hotel des Mille Collines. He managed to rally all his connections to keep people and his conscience alive.

He and his convoy were among the lucky ones who escaped. From whom? Who was the enemy? The answer is bleak in its simplicity: the man next door. The government had adopted a new policy according to which everyone in the country’s Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority (known affectionately as ‘cockroaches’). They imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could make the world a better place and the mass killing followed. Sound familiar?

For the first time in its history, the United Nations used the word ‘genocide’ to describe what happened in Rwanda. Philip Gourevitch, author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, reckons that the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. When I was growing up I often asked my parents who had lived during WW2 why they and their generation didn’t intervene to stop the Holocaust. Now I know why. They didn’t know until it was too late and anyway they were busy getting on with their own lives. Just like me in 1994. I was preparing to go and live in Africa with my young family when I saw live TV footage of a roadside machete attack in Rwanda. It chills me still to recall it. I was teaching in a school at the time where the caretaker was horrified that I would even consider taking children to the ‘dark continent’. I pointed out to him that our own history in Northern Ireland is bloody and violent to which he replied, ‘Ah, but here they only shoot you.’

Most people in Rwanda were not shot. No quick and clean executions but door to door hacking with machetes and ‘masus’ – clubs studded with nails – neighbour betraying and murdering neighbour. Tutsis accepted death as inevitable – warnings were sounded in regular radio bulletins. There was no escape. Some killers cut Achilles tendons so that they could stop to eat or sleep, leaving their victims in agony till morning and certain death. As in any conflict there are too many unanswerable questions: How did so many Tutsis allow themselves to be killed? How did so many Hutus allow themselves to kill? People used to obeying orders obeyed one too many, leaving the nameless and numberless dead.

Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland are neighbours. We have more in common with each other than with people anywhere else in the world. One newspaper headline last week declared that Republican dissidents are on the rise. We must stand together to resist violence because when the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch.

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

Primo Levi, 1986, The Drowned and the Saved

Old Photographs

I’m back in the wet after three weeks sunning in Florida and Indiana. I took a pile of old photographs over to my uncle’s – small sepia and black and white images of days long gone: a young couple, she bow legged and he in an ill-fitting suit with his hair slicked down posing outside a thatched cottage – my grandparents during their courtship.

I enjoyed listening to Ray reminisce about his days growing up on the farm. My favourite photos are of the horses, Dick and Captain, straining against the plough as they drew clean furrows in the resistant soil. I was thrilled to see the Amish people still ploughing in this way in Shipshewana. There is one beautiful picture of Granddad Harrison tending the huge carthorse while his tiny son grips the reins. The child is smiling and probably thought he was actually holding the horse when in fact his father was in control. A truth in black and white.

I spent my last week in Florida with Robin Mark and the band. People love to worship with them and I was moved by listening to stories of lives touched by his songs and music. He also tells a good tale and one of his favourites is about how his wife pleaded with him not to throw her a party for her 50th. Of course, he ignored her and we celebrated in style with an Abba tribute band, no less! He talks about how he dug out some old photographs for the occasion and discovered a young man staring back at him with hope, confidence and expectation – his younger self. He wonders whether a photograph taken today would show the same hope and optimism and sings a memorable little song:

Old photographs, I’m looking at scenes from history
Who are those people, where is that place?
Is that really me?

I’m older but no wiser; you’ve lost a little weight
Are those angelic faces the ones who stare across my breakfast table?

Old photographs, sweet memories
Happy days gone by
I love them and I hate them
For the camera does not lie

It’s my birthday today. I’ve also been looking at old images of me as a little girl. The scary thing is that I’m still wearing my hair like that! I have a cheeky smile because all is right with the world – I’m loved and happy and the future looks bright.

And what about now, half a century later? Well, I'm loved and happy and on most days the future still looks bright. As Robin sings, I don’t always feel wiser but I want to live what’s left in faith, not fear. I am thankful for the days. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places and I have a delightful inheritance.

One of my most treasured companions along the way has been Oswald Chambers who died in 1917 but whose writings continue to inspire. Today I read his challenge to keep reaching for the highest:

‘There is more than we have got at as yet.’